The time is near at hand when a documentary history of
American immigration must be made available for students of
that mighty and complex folk wandering. When such a magnum
opus is planned, a large place will undoubtedly be given
to "America letters" and "America books,"
for they are luminous revealers of the mind of the immigrant
in its reactions to the European situation, to the process of
transition, and to the difficulties of adjustment to American
surroundings. As one ranges over unpublished and published
materials in this field one finds everywhere, standing out in
relief, the record of a debate. On the one side were those who
opposed emigration, on the other those who favored it; and
into their debate went argument, informed opinion, prejudice
and ignorance, traditional choices and loyalties, discontents,
blind longings, stirring ambitions, the sharp tug of blood and
language and home, -- all the widely ramifying forces that
touch and influence and are affected by human migration on a
large scale. The story of this clash of ideas merges with the
larger story of a popular movement of great magnitude, and
this in turn becomes an intimate part of the broad social
history both of the Old World and of the New.

Several documents illustrating this common people's debate are
published in the present volume. These relate to the
immigration from Norway and have been turned into English from
the Norwegian. They include a letter by a disillusioned
immigrant whose testimony was spread broadcast by a bishop who
on his own account had issued a philippic aimed at the strange
madness that had entered the hearts of many commoners in
southwestern Norway. They include a letter by a
"doctrinaire idealist," beneath whose praise
of America smolders resentment over injustice and inequality
in a Europe that had not achieved Utopia through revolution.
They include extracts from letters by fair-minded immigrants
seeking consciously and through organized effort to refute
what they considered misrepresentation of America by hostile
critics. They include letters that tell naively of the
marvelous experiences that accompanied the exchange of one
world for another. And they include an argument against
emigration by a Norwegian who recognized the need of
modernizing agricultural methods in Norway about the middle of
the nineteenth century. These documents will help students to
piece out the history of Norwegian immigration to the United
States; perhaps they will also have a wider interest for those
who desire to understand the European emigration of the last
century. The Norwegian-American Historical Association is
collecting "America letters" and "America books"
both in Norway and in America, and it would like to encourage
the collection of similar and related materials for other
emigrant streams in the larger flow of European emigration.

In addition to six documentary contributions, this volume
contains three formal articles. One is a plea for the
preservation of a special kind of documentary source, -- the
church records of the Norwegian-Americans. One tells the life
story of a mid-western landnamsman, who was not unlike
the "land-takers" of the sagas in his combination of
force of character with generous cultural interests; his story
is a chapter in the social history of the American West. The
last article is a soaring survey of the Icelandic communities
of America and of the special elements in their backgrounds
that go so far to explain their present characteristics.